Re: Announcing gnomevfs-mount 0.0.1 (very first version).

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 01:26 +0200, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 17:53 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 14:38 -0600, Sandino Flores Moreno wrote:
> > > Hello folks.
> > > 
> > > Since I saw gmailfs (1), I wondered why gnome does not have a way to
> > > mount gnomevfs-uris on the linux filesystem.
> > 
> > Gnome in general has to work on many unix versions. It can't depend on a
> > specific kernel.
> 
> But we could use it in Linux so all applications will be able to access
> to remote locations and left the current code for unsupported platforms
> (and perhaps their developers could implement such support under their
> OS). As far as I know fuse is a library so you are not depending on the
> kernel directly.

Going fully to a FUSE-like approach would mean a huge redesign of how
the desktop handles things like this, and that would only work on linux.
Doing both is not gonna work very well.

> Users don't understand why they are not able to open files from remote
> locations on non GNOME applications. In fact, I don't know about any
> GNOME application that it's able to edit a remote file directly.

Well. We need to fix them then. 

> > Also, i personally think mounting things like this can be problematic.
> > There will be many posix details that the mounted filesystem won't
> > comply with, that an application using the normal filesystem might
> > depend on.
> 
> You are right, it's a problem, but IMHO those are called bugs, and bugs
> are fixable and those kind of bugs are easily fixable than, for
> instance, add gnome-vfs support in emacs or any piece of software that
> is able to open files.

The reason they don't follow posix semantics is that its not possible to
do so on non-posix backends.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a hate-fuelled devious hairdresser on the wrong side of the law. She's a 
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